China’s superpower economy still needs a superpower post-secondary system

In China, the gaokao or high exam, is both a blessing and a curse for students. Doing well on the test means going to college, but just passing the test doesn’t guarantee anything, despite a young lifetime of preparation.

This year, around 9.5 million high school students took the grueling, multi-day college entrance exam, competing for 6.5 million university positions. The test, a rite of passage, turns its highest scorers into instant celebrities. The interesting revelation: most of those high scorers rarely end up making history by becoming the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg.

China Daily, an English language newspaper, surveyed more than a thousand top scorers from 1977 to 2008 and found that “none of them stood out in the field of academics, business or politics.”